The film also features an ensemble cast of Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Danny Nucci, David Warner and Bill Paxton.

It was praised for its visual effects, performances (particularly those of DiCaprio, Winslet, and Gloria Stuart), production values, direction, score, cinematography, story, and emotional depth.

In 1996, aboard the research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, treasure hunter Brock Lovett and his team explore the wreck of RMS Titanic, hoping to find a necklace known as the Heart of the Ocean.

[51] Van Ling portrayed Fang Lang; his backstory inspired Cameron to produce a documentary The Six, based on a group of Chinese survivors who survived the sinking.

[53][54] The story could not have been written better had it been fiction ...The juxtaposition of rich and poor, the gender roles played out unto death (women first), the stoicism and nobility of a bygone age, the magnificence of the great ship matched in scale only by the folly of the men who drove her hell-bent through the darkness.

[13][14][24] Cameron convinced Fox to promote the film based on the publicity afforded by shooting the Titanic wreck,[60] and organized several dives over a period of two years.

[24] Cameron felt the Titanic sinking was "like a great novel that really happened", but that the event had become a mere morality tale; the film would give audiences the experience of living the history.

[69] Cameron built his Titanic on the starboard side as a study of weather data revealed it was a prevailing north-to-south wind, which blew the funnel smoke aft.

[77] On August 9, 1996, during the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh shoot in Canada, an unknown person, suspected to be a crew member, put the dissociative drug PCP into the soup that Cameron and various others ate one night in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

"[13][76] The Nova Scotia Department of Health confirmed that the soup had contained PCP on August 27, and the Halifax Regional Police Service announced a criminal investigation the next day.

[51] The post-sinking scenes in the freezing Atlantic were shot in a 350,000-US-gallon (1,300,000 L) tank,[94] where the frozen corpses were created by applying on actors a powder that crystallized when exposed to water, and wax was coated on hair and clothes.

[65] The climactic scene, which features the breakup of the ship directly before it sinks as well as its final plunge to the bottom of the Atlantic, involved a tilting full-sized set, 150 extras, and 100 stunt performers.

[98] For the Heart of the Ocean design, London-based jewelers Asprey & Garrard used cubic zirconias set in white gold[99] to create an Edwardian-style necklace to be used as a prop in the film.

[86] Paramount disagreed with Cameron's decision, but Fox acquiesced and went ahead and held the premiere on November 1, 1997, at the Tokyo International Film Festival,[110][86] where reaction was described as "tepid" by The New York Times.

[111] Positive reviews started to appear back in the United States; the official Hollywood premiere occurred on December 14, 1997, where "the big movie stars who attended the opening were enthusiastically gushing about the film to the world media".

[76] It's hard to forget the director on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium in LA, exultant, pumping a golden Oscar statuette into the air and shouting: "I'm the king of the world!"

"[147] Scott Meslow of The Atlantic stated while Titanic initially seems to need no defense, given its success, it is considered a film "for 15-year-old girls" by its main detractors.

"[14] The box office receipts "were even more impressive" when factoring in "the film's 3-hour-and-14-minute length meant that it could only be shown three times a day compared to a normal movie's four showings".

[153] Author Alexandra Keller, when analyzing Titanic's success, stated that scholars could agree that the film's popularity "appears dependent on contemporary culture, on perceptions of history, on patterns of consumerism and globalization, as well as on those elements experienced filmgoers conventionally expect of juggernaut film events in the 1990s – awesome screen spectacle, expansive action, and, more rarely seen, engaging characters and epic drama.

Writer-director James Cameron has restaged the defining catastrophe of the early 20th century on a human scale of such purified yearning and dread that he touches the deepest levels of popular moviemaking.

"[165] Janet Maslin of The New York Times commented that "Cameron's magnificent Titanic is the first spectacle in decades that honestly invites comparison to Gone With the Wind.

"[165] Adrian Turner of Radio Times awarded it four stars out of five, stating "Cameron's script wouldn't have sustained Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh for 80 minutes, but, somehow, he and his magical cast revive that old-style studio gloss for three riveting hours.

"[171] According to Dalin Rowell of /Film, "With complaints about its lengthy runtime, observations that certain characters could have easily fit onto pieces of floating furniture, and jokes about its melodramatic nature, Titanic is no stranger to modern-day criticism.

[176] In his 2012 study of the lives of the passengers on the Titanic, historian Richard Davenport-Hines said, "Cameron's film diabolized rich Americans and educated English, anathematizing their emotional restraint, good tailoring, punctilious manners and grammatical training, while it made romantic heroes of the poor Irish and the unlettered.

"[138] In 1998, Cameron responded to the backlash, and Kenneth Turan's review in particular, by writing "Titanic is not a film that is sucking people in with flashy hype and spitting them out onto the street feeling let down and ripped off.

He added that "the sinking of the great ship is no secret, yet for many exceeded expectations in sheer scale and tragedy" and that "when you consider that [the film] tops a bum-numbing three-hour running time, then you have a truly impressive feat of entertainment achieved by Cameron".

The sheer grandness of the film, combined with its tragic tale, pushed the boundaries of storytelling and visual effects, paving the way for future blockbusters.

The scene was replaced with an accurate view of the night-sky star pattern, including the Milky Way, adjusted for the location in the North Atlantic Ocean in April 1912.

In regards to the 3D effects, he noted the "careful conversion to 3D lends volume and impact to certain moments ... [but] in separating the foreground and background of each scene, the converters have carved the visual field into discrete, not organic, levels.

"[249] Ann Hornaday for The Washington Post found herself asking "whether the film's twin values of humanism and spectacle are enhanced by Cameron's 3-D conversion, and the answer to that is: They aren't."